It took a Nets substitute to beat a Spurs team full of them.
Alan Anderson broke out of a recent scoring funk to score 22 points — including 17 of 21 Nets points during one stretch in the second half — to help the Nets pull away from the game but injury-riddled Spurs and claim a 103-89 victory in front of a sellout crowd of 17,732 inside Barclays Center Thursday night.
With the win, the Nets (22-25) improved to 12-4 since the start of 2014 — a run that came after a blowout loss in San Antonio on New Year’s Eve — heading into a game in Detroit Friday night.
“I started attacking, and stopped settling for the 3 so much,” said Anderson, who shot 9-for-15 from the field but just 2-for-3 from 3-point range. “I just started attacking and once we started doing that, it started opening up the lane [for] kickouts, penetrating and dishing.
“Everything started opening up.”
After the Spurs (36-14), who were playing without Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili, Kawhi Leonard and Boris Diaw, cut the Nets’ lead to 68-66 late in the third quarter, the Nets looked as if they might risk being embarrassed on national television by losing to a severely depleted Spurs team on their home floor.
But that was before Anderson scored the final nine points of the quarter for the Nets, personally engineering a 9-2 run to send the Nets into the fourth with a 75-68 lead.
He then followed that up by scoring eight of the first 12 Nets points in the final quarter, as well as assisting on an Andrei Kirilenko for two of the other four points during that stretch, with his 3-pointer with 7:12 remaining giving the Nets an 87-77 lead they never would relinquish.
“Knowing that they didn’t have any shot-blockers [with Duncan out], our [goal] was to have Alan drive the ball and make something happen,” Nets coach Jason Kidd said. “Alan got to the basket, and he also made some big jumpers for us, too.”
Anderson’s breakout Thursday night snapped him out of a recent scoring funk that had seen him finish in single-digits in six of his last seven games, a stretch in which he had shot 15-for-44 (34.1 percent) from the field, including a dismal 7-for-29 (24.1 percent) from 3-point range.
After taking more than half his shots from behind the arc during those seven games, Anderson said he specifically focused on attacking the basket against the Spurs, as opposed to settling for jump shots.
“Lately I’ve just been just standing at the [3-point line] and letting it fly,” he said. “There’s more to my game than just that, and I need to help out the team as much as possible, and not by standing there and shooting 3’s.”
The Spurs were heavily undermanned for this one, with Duncan (rest), Parker (back spasms, groin), Ginobili (hamstring), Diaw (food poisoning) and Leonard (fractured hand) — all sitting, leaving Spurs coach Gregg Popovich with a patchwork lineup at his disposal.
“Two Americans, a Frenchman, an Italian and a Brazilian,” Popovich said with a wry smile when asked for his starting lineup before the game. “You guys can figure it out.”
It turned out to be one American and one Canadian, as Popovich sent out Green along with Cory Joseph (Canada), Nando De Colo (France), Marco Belinelli (Italy) and Tiago Splitter (Brazil) to begin the game, after the Spurs won in double overtime in Washington Wednesday night .
Regardless, the no-name Spurs immediately jumped out to an 18-6 lead — their biggest advantage of the game — and held the lead for virtually the entire first half. It wasn’t until a driving layup by Paul Pierce with 1:57 remaining in the second quarter that the Nets took their first lead of the game at 38-37.
That Pierce basket was part of a 17-4 run that spanned halftime, capped by a Pierce 3-pointer to make the score 47-41 early in the third, that looked like it would mark the beginning of the end for the undermanned Spurs. But San Antonio’s spare parts managed to hang around and make life miserable for the Nets before they finally could pull away for the win.
“We had to kind of wear them down,” Kirilenko said. “Give them credit. They play a great system [with] great tempo, and they presented a lot of trouble for us in the first half.
“But I think, in the third and fourth quarter, we kind of pulled away.”
The Nets had Anderson to thank for that.